“I was hoping we could talk,” Tracy said.
“Why would we do that?” Battles sounded more curious than adversarial.
“Because I think we both want the same thing.”
“You want to win the lottery and move to a yacht in the Mediterranean?”
“That would be nice,” Tracy said. “Though the grass isn’t always greener.”
“You see any grass around here?” Battles looked at the pavement. “What do we both want?”
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
Battles gave her an inquisitive stare. “A cop springing for a cup of coffee? Okay, I’m interested. Let me get my bike indoors. I lock it up out here and I’ll be lucky if they leave a spoke.”
Minutes after she went inside, Battles emerged without the bike, the helmet, or her shoes. She clutched Kleenex and wiped at her nose. She wore Birkenstock sandals with white socks. “I like to make a fashion statement when I go out,” she said. “The guys dig it.” She looked around the street. “So where do you want to go?”
“Your neighborhood,” Tracy said. “Pick a place and I’ll follow.”
“Okay.” Battles gave it some thought before leading Tracy around the block to Zeitgeist Coffee on Jackson Street. Battles ordered an iced coffee. Tracy ordered a decaf; she had enough trouble sleeping without caffeine in her system. “You want a bite to eat?” she asked.
Battles smiled. “This is beginning to feel like a date.”
Crosswhite held up a hand. “Married.”
“Yeah? Does he have a friend?”
Battles picked up her coffee and headed to one of the tables. Halfway across the shop she stopped to consider a dictionary open on a stand near the door. She scanned the words with her finger. “‘Intriguing,’” she read out loud. “‘Arousing one’s curiosity or interest. Fascinating.’” She looked at Crosswhite. “Prophetic.”
They took their coffees to an isolated table near a brick wall. Overhead, a white sculpture depicting clouds hung from an unfinished ceiling of beams, ductwork, and cables. Tracy removed her jacket and the two women sat in chairs across the table from each other. “You were out for a ride?”
“No,” Battles said. “The bike is a means to an end. I train on the north end of the city, and a car in this town is too expensive.”
“What are you training for?”
“Nothing in particular. I take a class called Krav Maga. Have you heard of it?”
“Not in any detail. Isn’t it Israeli commando fighting?”
Battles explained the development of the training and Tracy could sense her pride discussing it.
“Sounds practical,” Tracy said.
“In theory.” Battles sipped her drink. “But executed the right way, it’s disabling.” Battles set her cup on the table and leaned back in her chair. “Your meeting. Your agenda.”
“I don’t think you took the video.”
Battles gave a thin-lipped smile. “Unfortunately, you’d be in the minority.”
“There’s nothing in it for you to gain.”
“My client walks free and I’m the big winner.”
“And you’re prosecuted.”
“Potentially.”
“Potentially,” Tracy agreed. “I don’t see that as a fair trade—at least not one that benefits you.”
“I don’t know. I lose my law license, I’m dismissed, and I lose my pay—which is to say, I lose pretty much all the reasons I joined the Navy.”
“And you’re too smart to do something that stupid.”
Battles sat forward. “You sure this isn’t a date? You’re a lot nicer than some of the men I’ve gone out with.”
Tracy smiled. She was glad to see Battles hadn’t lost her edge. “So, will you talk to me?”
“I can’t talk about my client. Former client.”
“Understood.”
“Let me ask you a question first.” Battles sat up. “You don’t have jurisdiction and I’m sensing Seattle PD won’t be anxious to get back a dead-bang loser with the potential to incite the masses.”
“You may be right.”
“So why are you here? Why do you care?”
Tracy gave the question some thought. She’d made a ride out to Shaniqua Miller’s home after the meeting with Cerrabone, Dunleavy, and Clarridge. Miller had been polite, but clearly wasn’t interested in discussing the matter in detail with Tracy, whom she viewed as part of the justice system—which she now distrusted more than ever—and therefore part of the problem.
“I care about that boy,” Tracy said. “I care about a mother who may have to live the rest of her life without any answers.”
Battles sipped her coffee. Her gaze drifted out the plate-glass windows at the fading daylight and the streetlights illuminating the trunks and leaves of the trees in the sidewalk. An old-fashioned trolley car rumbled past the coffee shop, clanging as it went. She reconsidered Tracy. “Defending the wretched isn’t always the most popular position,” she said. Then, more subdued, she said, “Go ahead and ask your questions.”
Tracy gathered her thoughts, though she’d known where she’d start if Battles consented. She had snippets of what had happened from being present at the hearing and from her meeting that afternoon. She wanted to see how Battles reacted to being accused. “You were looking at the evidence the night before the hearing?”
“I was reviewing some of the evidence, but not the tape. I didn’t take it out of—Actually, I don’t even know if it was in the box at that point. But I do know that I didn’t look at it then. Why would I? I’d already looked at it. I won’t say what was on it or what I thought of it, but I pretty much knew it wasn’t going to change by looking at it again. Besides, I didn’t have a television to play it.”
It sounded plausible to Tracy. “Fair enough. What did you do with the box of evidence when you’d finished with it?”
“I took it back to the court reporter and left it on his chair. Ordinarily he signs it back in, but he’s a civilian and he was long gone by then. I’ve done it before. We operate on the honor system.” She raised her fingers in a Girl Scout’s salute.
“Is his office in the same building?”
“It is. He’s located on the second floor across from the courtroom.”
“Where’s Cho’s office?”
Battles smiled. “Second floor, just down the hall from the court reporter.”
“What time did you return the box?”
“After Cho left my office, if that’s where you’re headed, between ten forty-five and eleven p.m.”
“Cho came to your office?”
“On his way out the door to go home.”
“And you still had the box of evidence?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see him leave?”
“The building? Only on the security tape.”
“Your building has a security camera?”
“Inside the door, positioned to view the lobby.”
Tracy hadn’t thought of security for the building. She made a mental note to get that video. “How do you get in? Is the door secure?”
“Always. You punch in the last four digits of your Social Security number. If it recognizes your digits, you get in. If it doesn’t, you don’t.”
“Where is that record kept, the record of acceptable Social Security numbers?”
“There’s a security office on the first floor, just down the hall from me. I assume they have it. They also keep all the surveillance videos.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. Never been an issue before.”
“Is that where the tape for that night is kept?”
“Yes, but my OIC has a copy.”
“Your OIC?”
“Officer in charge. Rebecca Stanley.”
“And you’ve seen that tape.”
“I have.”
Tracy looked for some tell from Battles as she spoke. “What time did you leave that night?”
“The building? Sh
ortly after Cho. The last ferry departs at eleven forty. It takes me about ten minutes to ride my bike from the office to the Bremerton Ferry Terminal. So I returned the evidence to the court reporter’s office and left the building right after that.”
“You should have just slept at the office.”
Battles held up a bare left hand. “Did I mention that I’m still single and not looking to die alone?”
“Did anyone see you return the box?”
“No one else was in the building, at least not that I’m aware of.”
“Okay,” Tracy said. “And to your knowledge, no one came into the building after you?”
“Just the janitor. He’s on the tape.”
“Is the company military or civilian?”
“Civilian.”
“Anyone talk to him?”
“I assume NCIS. They’re talking to everyone, including me.”
Tracy made a mental note to determine whether NCIS had typed up their interviews.
Battles said, “So it seems someone removed the tape before I checked out the box, or got in early the following morning, saw it on the court reporter’s chair, and removed it.”
“Cho?”
“I don’t know, but if I had nothing to gain by taking the tape, he really had nothing to gain. Not having the tape hurt him.”
“And it would be risky to remove the tape before you had checked out the box?”
“You mean because I could have noticed it was missing? My OIC said the same thing. Seems to make the most sense, but like I said, no one came in or out of the building after me except the janitors.”
“Who has access to your offices?” Tracy asked.
“Other than the janitors?” Battles shrugged. “Everyone with an approved Social Security number.”
“How many would that be?”
Battles scoffed. “A lot.” She became more pensive. “Not a bad thought to get that list, but aren’t you ignoring the same question you asked me?”
“Why would someone do it?”
Battles nodded.
Tracy didn’t know, but she’d get the printout of the codes entered for that evening anyway.
Jeanine Welch walked Del and Faz down the porch to the broken front gate, her arms folded tight across her body to ward off the chill. Dusk had given way to night. The sporadic streetlamps spotted the sidewalk in pale yellow light, and an array of cables and wires stretched between telephone poles and the houses on the block. Somewhere down the street two boys shouted, likely rushing to finish a game on their small patch of lawn before darkness enveloped them.
Welch paused at the gate, or where the gate should have been. “He kicked it off its hinges when he left a few nights ago.” She sounded weary. “He wanted money. He said it was to buy a new amplifier, but I’ve come to know better than to give Jack any money.” She turned back to her home. “I used to have more things, but anything I have of value he steals and sells. He sold the jewelry I’d inherited from my mother, our toaster, televisions, his sister’s bike. He denies it, but I know he did.”
Del reached inside his pocket and pulled out a packet of business cards. He handed one to Jeanine Welch. “Allie was my niece,” he said. “That’s why I was at the service.”
Her hand stopped, as if the card might bite. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“If there’s ever anything I can do.”
She nodded and tentatively took the card.
Del heard the heavy bass beat of muffled music. A late-model Honda Accord sped around the street corner, nearly hitting one of the parked cars, and jerked to a stop at the end of the driveway.
“That’s Jack,” Welch said, sounding somewhat hesitant.
Jack took one look at Faz and Del talking to his mother and quickly threw the car into reverse, grinding gears as he did.
“He’s running,” Del said, moving to the passenger door of the Prius. Faz hurried around the hood to the driver’s side.
The Honda stuttered and stalled in the street. Jack restarted the engine, struggled to find the right gear, and lurched forward.
Faz started the Prius and dropped it into gear. They wouldn’t break any land speed records, but that was a good thing. They wouldn’t engage Welch in a high-speed chase, if that was his intent. Regulations forbade it, and they didn’t want to see anyone injured unnecessarily.
The Accord turned right at the stop sign without so much as a pause.
Faz pumped the brakes, slowed at the corner to ensure no cars were coming, and turned to follow.
“Left at the next corner,” Del said. “He ran another stop sign.”
“See if we can get some help before he kills someone. Right taillight is out,” Faz said.
Del picked up the microphone and called in the make and model of the Honda, its license plate, and their current location and direction. If Welch took an on-ramp onto the freeway, they’d alert the highway patrol and turn the chase over to them.
Parked cars whizzed past their windows. Faz glanced down at the dash—fifty miles per hour on a residential road. His eyes searched for cars pulling from the curb or backing down driveways, and for kids on the sidewalk.
“Any help?” he asked Del.
Del continued to provide their location on the radio. “There’s a patrol unit close by,” he said to Faz.
“I’m going to slow down and back off. Maybe he will too. He’s making another turn,” Faz said.
Del called it in.
Up ahead, what Faz had feared came to sudden fruition. As the Honda accelerated, a red truck backed quickly down a driveway.
“Hang on,” Faz said.
The Honda’s single taillight illuminated and its brakes screeched. The hood dipped low and struck the rear panel of the truck with a loud bang of crumpled metal and shattered glass.
“Call for an ambulance,” Faz said, but the Honda’s driver’s-side door pushed open and Welch scurried out. “This guy is like a freaking cat.”
“I’m on it.” Del pushed open his car door, giving chase.
Welch sprinted across several front lawns, then turned down a driveway. Del wouldn’t catch him; his prime was well in the past, but having lost fifteen pounds, he felt good just keeping up. Welch scaled a fence along the side of a house and scurried over it. As Del looked for a gate latch, a floodlight illuminated on the corner of the house and a big dog barked and growled. Hands reappeared atop the fence, followed quickly by Jack Welch’s head and shoulders. The boy looked panicked. He lifted a leg over the fence and flopped hard on the grass-and-concrete drive. His lower pant leg had been ripped. Del put a knee in his back and snapped cuffs on each wrist. A man came through the gate carrying a baseball bat. “SPD,” Del said, fishing out his badge from his pocket and holding it up for the man to see.
Then he turned back to Welch. “You have the right to remain silent.”
CHAPTER 28
Del and Faz opted not to take Jack Welch to jail and instead stuck him in one of the interrogation rooms. At his desk, Del called Celia McDaniel for advice.
“The statute clearly provides that to convict a driver you needed to be in uniform and the car equipped with lights and sirens,” McDaniel said over the speakerphone.
Faz shook his head. “If Welch gets a criminal defense lawyer worth his weight in salt, he’ll know we didn’t meet any of those criteria, or he’d find out quickly enough. You have any advice?”
“You could book him for reckless driving or reckless endangerment, but those are misdemeanors with unlikely jail time and a minimal financial penalty. Even if Welch couldn’t pay, all it would mean is he’d be cleaning up garbage along the freeways.”
“But Welch doesn’t know the law,” Faz said. “And his mom isn’t likely to bail him out.”
“Doesn’t sound like he’s on speaking terms with his father either,” Del agreed. So they had some leverage, at least for now. “Sounds as though we’ll get more bang for our buck if we question him before we book him. Frankly, I don’t give a rat
’s ass about a charge of eluding a police officer or reckless endangerment. I want to find out what Welch knows.”
“If he asks for an attorney, all bets are off,” Celia said.
“So we take that chance,” Del said.
They thanked her and disconnected.
The windowless interrogation rooms on the seventh floor of Police Headquarters weren’t a lot of fun to sit in alone, and they got considerably smaller, and uncomfortable, when both Faz and Del squeezed their hulking frames inside. They took pride in making the room feel as small as possible, and they excelled at it.
They let Welch stew while continuing to debate their dilemma, observing him from behind the one-way mirror in the viewing room. Welch might have been eighteen years old, but he didn’t look it. “He looks sixteen, at best,” Del said.
Five feet seven inches, small boned, and rail thin, Welch couldn’t have weighed 120 pounds fully dressed. “I got coatracks weigh more than him,” Faz said.
Welch wore an unbuttoned, long-sleeve flannel shirt, likely to hide the track marks on his arms, and a black T-shirt with a picture of the Seattle grunge band Nirvana. His hair touched his shoulders and looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. He kept his head tilted, looking out from behind bangs. “He thinks he’s Kurt Cobain,” Faz said.
“Who?” Del said.
“His shirt. That’s the singer who had the drug problem. He shot himself two decades ago. Antonio listened to that crap.”
“I’ve got enough trouble keeping current,” Del said.
“You never had a teenage boy at home.”
“If this guy is the type of boy I’d have, I’ll take Sonny. At least his hair is short, he bathes, and he comes when I call him.”
It pained Del to think this was the guy Allie had been dating, that she thought so little of herself. But he again suspected, based on what the mother had told them about Jack’s need for money, that his relationship with Allie had not been based on mutual attraction but on mutual need—what Oprah, or Dr. Phil, would call “codependence”—a mutual need for heroin.
Close to Home (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 5) Page 20